An Acer executive has contradicted one of his colleagues and claimed the company will not follow Apple into the multimedia web tablet arena.
Acer Taiwan chief Scott Lin said the company has no plans to launch a gadget along the lines of Apple's iPad.
But last week, Jim Wong, head of Acer’s IT products division, said the company …

Acer's core business?

Problem is Acer is not in the OS business. What would they put on it? Android? Chrome OS, Windows Mobile? Or maybe whatever Microsoft is touting as a tablet OS at the moment?

The Windows solutions won't give it the same WOW as the iPad (at least to fanbois), and Android or Chrome OS will probably need some some development by Acer to make it attractive to customers.

I would actually like to see a device like the iPad running WebOS, but I doubt that Palm have the spare cash to develop such a thing. Tablet, pen/touch integration, Multi-tasking, a long history of developer-friendly application environments. I believe that it would be more usable than what we have been told the iPad will deliver. Still, we can dream.

OS

GoogleOS

From a hardware point of view, there is nothing much to it. The success of iPad could come with the software applications - those already provided by Apple and of course Apple App store.

As for alternatives, Android can not be ported (at least with the support of Google) to that sort of devices / scree size. There is no point of having Microsoft or other "notebook" OS (ubuntu...) as there will be very little selling point (that would really end up being a notebook/netbook without keyboard!)

The only possibility is Google Chrome OS - complete with the applications that can make such a device a success. But we will have to wait until the end of the year.